arturo escobar cultura practicas y politica

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DOI: 10.1177/0308275X9201200402 1992; 12; 395 Critique of Anthropology

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Culture, Practice and PoliticsAnthropology and the study of social movements

Arturo EscobarSmith College, Northampton, MA

Anthropology, it is now widely accepted, has experienced deep changesduring the 1980s, to the extent that, according to some, a significant’re-imagining’ of the discipline has been set underway (Marcus andFischer, 1986; Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Clifford, 1988; Rosaldo, 1989).During the same period, a whole body of literature has appeared, mostly inwestern Europe and Latin America, dealing with the nature and role ofsocial movements in relation to the crisis of modernity and the possibility ofnew social orders. This work emerged in an epistemological and politicalconjuncture not unlike that faced by anthropology today. Anthropologists,however, have remained largely absent from this lively debate; this

marginalization, regrettable in itself, given what anthropology can contri-bute to this field, is the more important given that social movementsresearch highlights precisely the questions of political practice that canhelp anthropology work out some of its deeper predicaments.

This paper argues for a type of anthropological research that is informedby recent social movements theory and research and that, while buildingon current critiques in the discipline, pays more attention to its own politicsby focusing on the political practice of collective social actors. Afterdiscussing the invisibility of social movements in anthropology (part I), themost important notions currently used in social movements theory arebriefly presented with the aim of demonstrating the relevance of socialmovements research for anthropology (part II). This relevance is illus-trated with a brief example from the recent work of an anthropologistinspired by contemporary social movements theory (Part III), after whichthe article concludes with a discussion of the consequences of the previousanalysis for current debates in anthropology (part IV).

Critique of Anthropology © 1992 (SAGE, London, Newbury Park and NewDelhi), Vol. 12(4): 395-432.395



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L The invisibility of social movements in anthropologySince the late 1970s, interest in social movements and other forms ofcollective action has grown steadily, indeed flourished, in many politicaland scholarly spaces (political science, history, sociology, philosophy,plus interdisciplinary fields such as women’s studies, Latin AmericanStudies, and ecology) in various parts of the world. Today’s social move-ments are seen as playing a central role in producing the world in whichwe live, its social structures and practices, its meanings and cultural orien-tations, its possibilities for change. Social movements, it is argued,emerge out of the crisis of modernity; they orient themselves towards theconstitution of new orders, and embody a new understanding of politicsand social life itself. They result in the formation of novel collectiveidentities which foster social and cultural forms of relating and solidarityas a response to the crises of meanings and economies that the world facestoday.

Anthropologists have been largely absent from this extremely activeand engaging trend. It is important to examine why this has been the case,and what specific and perhaps important problems are associated withthis absence. Conversely, it is important to think about why, and in whatways, anthropologists could begin to pay serious attention to the issuesraised by contemporary social movements. It might be possible, perhaps,to think about a type of anthropology-informed social movements re-search in ways that say something new about anthropology as well. If, astheorists have shown, social movements take place at the intersection ofculture, practice (collective and everyday), and politics, what doesanthropology have to say about the processes by which these intersectionsare established? What new concepts, or what displacement of currentconcepts, would anthropology have to effect in order to participate in theexamination of such processes? In other words, how would anthropologyhave to change to accommodate the interests of social movements, andwhy would anthropologists want to do so? Although anthropologists havegiven attention to political issues at various points in time, the disciplineas a whole is not well equipped to examine the ways in which contempor-ary social actors shape their world through collective political action.What does this say about anthropology?Strathem (1988) has best stated the general thrust of a discussion of this

nature, as far as anthropology is concerned:

Far from throwing out such [established anthropological] frameworks forunderstanding, I argue instead that we should acknowledge the interestsfrom which they come. They endorse a view of society that is bound with



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the very impetus of anthropological study. But the impetus itself derivesfrom Western ways of creating the world ... It becomes important that weapproach all such [political] action through an appreciation of the culture ofWestern Social Science and its endorsement of certain interests in the

description of social life. That affords a vantage point from which it will bepossible to imagine the kinds of interests that may be at stake as far asMelanesians [and others] are concerned. (Strathem, 1988:4)

In other words, one would have to look for the roots of the absence ofattention to contemporary collective political practice in anthropology inthat space that defines anthropology as bound with certain ’Western waysof creating the world’ . What is the ’culture’ of anthropology, its set of inter-ests, that has blocked attention (at least recently) from these important as-pects of social life? How have anthropology’s modes of knowledge workedin order to exclude them from serious consideration? If anthropology’sanalytical constructs have made visible certain social, cultural and econ-omic realities, why have anthropologists in general turned a blind eye tothe crucial issue of collective political practice? What kinds of social inter-ests and politics has anthropology incorporated instead?The interest of this paper is not so much to conduct this type of critical

reflection about anthropology, but rather to indicate in a general way therelevance of social movements research for the discipline. This relevancederives from the basic fact that today’s social movements are seen not onlyas political struggles in pursuit of socio-economic goals but also, andessentially, as cultural struggles. Some reasons have already been given ofwhy anthropology is ill-prepared to deal with questions of collective actionand political practice, and it is worth mentioning some of them here.Rosaldo, for instance, has indicated the bias in anthropology towardssynchronic, static and objectivist modes of inquiry. In recalling his firstfieldwork experience in the early 1970s, he tells us how the ’broad rule ofthumb under classic norms to which Michelle Rosaldo and I still

ambivalently subscribed seems to have been that if it’s moving it isn’tcultural. In emphasizing social hierarchies and self-enclosed cultures, thediscipline encouraged ethnographers to study the crystalline patterns of awhole culture, and not the blurred zones in between’ (Rosaldo, 1989: 209).These classic norms, as it is well known today, are eroding, andethnographers are now studying issues that were previously excluded ormarginalized, including processes of rapid change, questions of culturalheterogeneity and interculturality, peasant resistance in the context ofglobal economic forces, and so forth. But the organized aspects ofcollective resistance still prove elusive for anthropology.The 1980s have provided us with other clues as to why this is the case.



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Within anthropology, the emphasis on practice and resistance, as well assome recent developments associated with what has been called the’postmodern turn in anthropology’ and with feminist anthropology, havecontributed other explanations and presented possibilities to close the gapthat exists between the discipline and the study of social movements. In aninfluential piece published in the early 1980s, Ortner (1984) highlighted thegrowing importance of the concept of practice for anthropology. Elabor-ated initially in response to Parsonian/Durkheimian views of the world asordered by rules and norms, and as a complement to the study of structuresand systems, a new emphasis on practice, Ortner argued, arose in order toaccount for the role of human action in the genesis, reproduction andchange of socio-cultural orders. Contrary to earlier attention to socializ-ation and ritual practices in reproducing the ’system’, the new tendenciesfocused on everyday practices in the belief that it is the temporal, spatialand social orderings underlying daily activities that sustain social systems.In sum, the practice perspective in anthropology would have examinedhow society and culture are produced by human action. Coupled with morecarefully conducted historical analyses (Rosaldo, 1980; Price, 1983, 1990;Fals Borda, 1984; Sahlins, 1985), these two trends, Ortner predicted, couldafford a more complex view of the interaction of system and practice in thehistorical production of societies.As we now know, the 1980s in anthropology ended up being not so

much about practice as about representation and textuality (or, more ac-curately, about those practices that inform representation and its poli-tics). But before we shift to this aspect, it is important to highlight theimportance of practice. As we will see, this concept is central to contem-porary social movements research. Despite important advances, under-standing of the nature of practice can be said to be just beginning.Philosophers have made us aware for some time that it is as participantsin practices that we develop knowledge and beliefs, that we acquirerationalities and understanding. Social sciences themselves are seen as apractice, to the extent to which the grounds on which they are based andthe activities of the scientists are the product of social practices.’ Thedynamics of discourse, practice, domination and resistance, however, areless well understood. Building upon Foucault’s work, de Certeau has pro-vided the most general conceptualization of this dynamic from the pointof view of local practices. If domination proceeds, de Certeau argues(1984), through strategies that organize space and knowledge in ways thatlead to the colonization of physical, social and cultural environments, the’marginal majority’, that is, all those who have to exist within structuresof domination, are not merely passive receivers of the conditions of



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domination. As ’users’ of these conditions, people effect multiple andinfinitesimal transformations of dominant forms, in order to adapt them totheir own interests and partially subject them to their own rules. Populartactics, in de Certeau’s view, thus effect a sort of ’anti-discipline’, and ’artof making’ that operates at the level of everyday life and which is verysignificant in shaping the world. Some of these issues will be furtherdiscussed in the third part of the paper.As we shall see, this micro-production of the world through tactics in the

terrain of everyday life is essential for understanding the action ofcontemporary social movements. In anthropology, these ’arts of the

weak’, or ’weapons of the weak’, to use Scott’s (1985) catchy label, havebeen the subject of study since the late 1970s, especially in ’ethnographiesof resistance’ (for instance, Taussig, 1980; Guha, 1983; Fals Borda, 1984;Comaroff, 1985; Scott, 1985; Urla, 1986; Ong, 1987; Comaroff andComaroff, 1991). Although very important in and of itself, this literature,with few exceptions, has not pushed the question of resistance towards oneof its possible logical conclusions, namely, that point at which resistancegives way to more organized forms of collective action or social move-ments. To be sure, Scott’s analysis was explicitly set to study ’everydayforms of resistance’, as opposed to open, broader social and politicalconfrontations. Closer to recent social movements research is Comaroff’s

study of the Zionist movement among the Tshidi of Southern Africa(1985). Her weaving of the social practices, historical processes, andcultural mediations that defined this movement in the context of globalcultural and economic transformations represent an insightful and usefulapproach to the study of social movements. As we shall see, however,there is something to be gained by making a more explicit connectionbetween practice and resistance concerns in the anthropology of the 1980s,on the one hand, and the new theorizing on social movements, on theother.2There have been other important forerunners of studies of social

movements within anthropology. Studies of cargo cults and religiouspolitical movements are perhaps the most important historical referentwithin the discipline in this regard. Millenarian, nativist, and revivalistmovements were paid growing attention during the 1940s, 1950s and early1960s.3 Although an in-depth retrospective look at this literature is beyondthe scope of this paper, it can be said in general that the historical context(colonialism), the types of movements, the goals and practices of themovements, and the theoretical frameworks (anthropological and other-wise) used by the researchers were largely different from those at stake incontemporary movements, although some overall similarities remain, such



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as the importance of cultural and symbolic aspects of resistance, their linkto politics, and their positioning vis-a-vis western forces. A handful ofanthropologists also theorized and studied social movements generally atan earlier period (Gerlach and Hine, 1970).More recently, certain advocacy anthropology, such as the one practiced

by Cultural Survival, can be said to be involved with indigenous people’ssocial movements. To this extent, anthropologists, much before politicalscientists, have been attuned to the political dimensions of the cultural.Actually, the expansion of the political domain to encompass the cultural isone of the central features of contemporary social movements theory, andthis expansion suggests unprecented questions in both political science andanthropology, actually bringing the two fields closer together. Some ofthese questions, as Lynn Stephen (1990) argues, are not necessarily new.Besides cargo cult studies, studies of informal networks in Latin Americasuch as those based on kin, compadrazgo, friendship, religious and ethnicties have been studied by anthropologists from the perspective of their rolein political movements and the merging of culture, politics and religion,although it must be pointed out that these questions take on a novelsignificance within contemporary social movements theory, as will bediscussed shortly.

Finally, one could think of political economy inspired studies as linked tosocial movements research. A number of studies carried out in the 1950s

(Worsley, 1957; Wolf, 1959) presaged the 1970s concern with placingcommunities within a world system, namely, the capitalist world economy.They represented, however, marginal trends within economic anthro-pology, and would achieve salience only in the 1970s (Ortner, 1984).Wolf-type studies (1969, 1982) belong to a historically oriented politicaleconomy which sought to recapture the participation of non-westernpeople in the making of the world. But even if this type of peasant studiesbrought a new interest in the political activity of the rural poor, peasantstended to be seen as merely responding to international capitalism, whiletheir role in the active construction of peasant movements and alternativepolitical cultures went largely unexamined.As Ranajit Guha asserts in his analysis of peasant studies in colonial

India, the rebel’s acts were always seen in this literature as elements ofanother history with another subject, such as capitalism or nationalism,thus denying that ’the insurgent can rely on its performance to recover itsplace in history’ (Guha, 1988: 84). In other words, peasants were portrayedas lacking the kinds of historical agency that would make them into socialactors in their own right. More generally, peasant studies that relied ontotalizing narratives paid little attention to the problems of meaning and



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identity that are essential for understanding rural forms of protest (Stam,1992), thus participating in what Guha eloquently calls ’the prose ofcounter-insurgency’ (1988). It is precisely this type of historical agency thatsocial movements literature tries to capture, in part through its rejection oftotalizing narratives. 4

In sum, although there has been a current within anthropology that haslooked at certain types of social and political movements, highlighting therole of cultural and symbolic factors for the political, there recently hasarisen a gap between these very same sets of concerns - generally speaking,the link between the cultural and the political, and the nature and modes ofpolitical practice - and anthropological practice. This gap is most evident ifone looks at the rich social movements literature that has been producedduring the 1980s in other sectors. This absence of attention originates in anumber of factors, including the concentration on representation as apolitical arena during the 1980s, which, although of great importance,shifted attention from other political terrains; an individual-orientednotion of practice; divisions of labour within the academy; the nature ofacademic practices themselves, which make unlikely certain styles ofresearch (see part IV); and perhaps even the decline of collective action inthe United States during the same decade. As we shall see, there is a lot tobe gained from raising again the questions of culture and political practicewithin the new conceptual terrain that social movements theory hasbrought to light, and without disregarding current epistemological cri-tiques within the discipline.

Anti-colonial struggles and, more recently, the forceful emergence ofthe voices and political interests of ’other’ actors (women, ’minorities’,subaltern groups of all kinds) have fractured the once unproblematicrepresentation of the world in terms of a western, male understanding thateither made differences invisible or that, through totalizing represen-tations, assigned them to places where they would by necessity have asubordinated and, to the extent possible, harmless role to play. At the basisof the current crisis of forms of representation and paradigms ofmodernity, thus, there is this veritable explosion of other realities, as somescholars have clearly pointed out (Said, 1989; hooks, 1990; Quijano, 1988; ,Anzaldua, 1990; JahMohamed and Lloyd, 1990). But much theorizing ’

about postmodernism, including that taking place in anthropology, haspaid insufficient attention to the political impetus that motivated the crisisof modernity. It is only by recognizing this aspect of the crisis that thecultural and epistemological critique of postmodernism can have a radicalprojection.

Current discussions on the nature of social movements address their



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potential for transforming the social and cultural orders brought about bymodernity. The basic thrust of these discussions, for instance, in LatinAmerica, where perhaps more than anywhere else they have an explicitpolitical content, is that the social movements of today can be seen as botha reflection of the crisis of modernity and a privileged domain forunderstanding the processes by which new realities are coming into being.’This thinking is accompanied by an effort to understand the concrete waysin which modem practices have created the world and how those practicesmight be today under scrutiny, beyond the more general aspects providedby theorists of postmodernism about the crisis of ’metanarratives’,conventional epistemologies and the like. More importantly perhaps, itaffords important clues for rethinking how groups of people participatecollectively in fashioning their worlds in their everyday life, grounded intheir own cultures and meanings. Various theories of social movements,sketched in section II, provide valuable approximations to these questions.

11. Culture, practice and politics in social movementsresearch

As was already mentioned, research and writing on social movements havegrown steadily since the late 1970s, especially in western Europe and LatinAmerica.6 This interest is the result of an intellectual and politicalconjuncture, which, of course, has different characteristics in various partsof the world, but which is broadly associated with the crisis of modernity.In Latin America, the crisis is seen chiefly in terms of the failure of thepolicies and strategies of development pursued during the past forty years,on the one hand, and of the inability of the State and conventional politicalinstitutions - especially political parties of all kinds, right or left - to dealwith social problems and provide workable and convincing definitions ofcultural, social and economic life. Development and Revolution, the twogreat organizing principles of the previous decades, are no longer tenable.Not only did development fail to insure a minimum level of materialprosperity for most people, but people failed to behave in the wayspredicted by dominant theories: neither did they embrace ’development’and the rationality of modernity and economic efficiency, as moderniz-ation theorists predicted, nor did they jubilantly and decisively joinrevolutionary struggles, as Marxist analysts had prognosticated. This dualcrisis of paradigms and economies is forcing a new situation, a ’socialreconfiguration’, as a Latin American commentator has aptly put it (Mires,1987) .While at the level of theory there is still significant disagreement and



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confusion regarding the extent of the transformation and the nature of thenew actors, the phenomenon itself seems well substantiated by an alreadysizable amount of empirical research. In Latin America, for instance, ahost of social movements have irrupted in the theoretical and politicallandscape. Urban popular movements, Christian base communities, newtypes of peasant and workers’ mobilizations, and a vast array of novelforms of popular protest (for instance, for basic needs and local autonomy)have been extensively investigated. Increasing attention is being paid towomen’s, ethnic and grassroots movements of various kinds, whereas afew excellent studies already exist of the gay and ecology movements.Human rights and defense of life issues, as well as youth forms of protest,have been important in some countries. Citizens’ movements of diversenature, as well as movements for regional autonomy, complete the list ofthe most visible movements as they have appeared in Latin Americatoday.’The new questions faced by researchers concerning unprecedented

social processes have led to important theoretical reorientations and theemergence of new topics, such as the reappraisal of civil society and theState, the importance of the micro-sociology and politics of daily life, thepossibility for new types of pluralist democracies, alternative ways ofsatisfying basic needs, and so forth. The cultural and symbolic aspects oftoday’s social movements are widely emphasized, and this by itself wouldsuggest an important role for anthropologists. An exhaustive presentationof even the most important of these theories is clearly beyond the scope ofthe paper (see Escobar, 1992). In what follows, some of the most salienttheoretical issues are briefly sketched, especially from the vantage point oftheir relevance to anthropological concerns.

Theoretical issues in social movements research

The works of Alain Touraine, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, andthat of Alberto Melucci and his co-workers in Italy are the most developedand well-known of the European theories. Touraine’s work, which spansover two decades of research in both Europe and Latin America, is

undoubtedly the most comprehensive theoretical system in the area ofsocial movements. Central to Touraine’s conception is the insight that, forthe first time, (post-industrial) society is becoming the result of a complexset of actions that society performs upon itself. These actions are

performed by social actors who may have conflictual interests but whonevertheless share certain cultural orientations. For Touraine (1981: 29),thus, social movements are not ’dramatic events’ but rather ’the work that



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society performs upon itself. The goal of this action is the control ofhistoricity, that is, ’the set of cultural models that rule social practices’(1988a: 8), and which are embodied in knowledge, economic, and ethicalmodels. What then is a social movement?

A social movement is the action, both culturally oriented and sociallyconflictual, of a social class defined by its position of domination ordependency in the mode of appropriation of historicity, of the culturalmodels of investment, knowledge and morality toward which the socialmovement itself is oriented. (Touraine 1988: 68)

The essential feature of this definition is that actors recognize the stakes interms of a cultural project; in other words, what is at stake for

contemporary social movements, according to Touraine, is historicityitself, not merely organizational forms, services, economic gains and thelike. Touraine, however, draws a sharp distinction between post-industrialand Third World societies in this respect. In the Latin American,’dependent’ case, for instance, most social mobilization, he insists (1987),does not constitute social movements but rather struggles for the process ofsocial change and development. Moreover, given the centrality of the Statein guiding the process of modernization and development, the stakes arenot historicity but greater participation in the political system and theState. Touraine’s conclusion is that only post-industrial society has reachedthe ’highest level of historicity’, that is, that of self-production. Traditionalsocieties still ’lie within history’ (1981: 105), meaning that their ability toproduce the models by which they function is more limited since the

distancing that historicity requires (from God, oneself and the world asobject) has not been achieved. Latin America and other Third Worldsocieties would be in the process in achieving this highest level throughindustrialization and development.

This is a problematic aspect in Touraine’s work. As in other eurocentricdiscourses (including, as we will see, that of Laclau and Mouffe), the ThirdWorld is represented as having reduced historical agency in relation to theEuropean. But why, one may ask, must this type of objectifying distancing- which, as Foucault (1970) has shown, is an outstanding feature ofmodernity - be the only route to historicity? For if it is true that the modemWest was the first society to turn the apparatus of objectifying knowledgeupon itself, it is also true that this kind of self-reflection on social life is notthe only possible one. Anthropology’s lessons in this regard have beenexemplary. From recent studies one leams, for instance, about thesophisticated historical consciousness of the Saramakas of Surinam (Price,1983, 1990), 18th-century Hawaiians (Sahlins, 1985), the Ilongot of the



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Philippines (Rosaldo, 1980), or today’s Colombian peasants (Fals Borda,1984, 1986); or one is instructed about the manifold forms of resistance -with varying degrees of self-reflective consciousness - practiced as adefense of their way of life by Third World people under conditions ofneo-colonialism (Taussig, 1980; Guha, 1983; Fals Borda, 1984; Scott,1985; Comaroff, 1985; Ong, 1987); or, finally, one is forced to recognizethe weighty presence of myth in real life and history, and, in general, thepowerful effects of seemingly unconscious constructions on meaning andreality (Favret-Saada, 1980; Taussig, 1987). In relation to Latin Americansocial movements, this point has been made forcefully by Calder6n andReyna: ’what is important’, these authors assert, ’is that society can thinkitself consciously’ (1990: 12). This, of course, is historicity.

Despite the fact that Touraine seems to remain within a philosophy ofhistory which is not free of certain teleology and rationalism, his insistencethat social movements cannot be understood independently of culture is ofparamount importance. His notion of historicity, more precisely, insin-uates many ways in which anthropologists could contribute to the

understanding of social movements and their relation to social and politicallife. Historicity, anthropologists may argue, originates in a background ofcultural meanings, according to a dynamic that includes the interaction oftradition and modernity, domination and resistance, as well as thediscursive articulation of cultural contents, the establishment of social andcultural orders, and struggles around all of these issues. These processesare by no means well understood. The effect of social movements oninter-subjective meanings and cultural forms has remained largely intract-able, and so have related issues such as the self-definition of the

movements, their interpretation of dominant identities, and their buildingof contestatory positions based on those interpretations. Moreover, onemay ask, how is a ’political culture’ carved out of the background culturaldomain within a given society? What in this background, and through whatprocesses, is articulated into political discourse? How are culture andpolitics intertwined in the practices of the ’new actors’? All of these issuesare profoundly anthropological, and even if sociologists and politicalscientists are paying increasing attention to them, the potential contri-bution of anthropologists is great.The work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985; Mouffe, 1984,

1988; Laclau, 1985, 1988) provides a different set of elements to rethinkthe nature of the political in relation to today’s movements. Clearly lo-cated within post-structuralist and post-Marxist theorizing, these authorstake as their point of departure the inevitable discursive character of allsocial practice. The implications of this assumption for understanding



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social movements are profound. Since meaning - as anthropologistsrecognize as well - cannot be permanently fixed, but is always changing andcontextual, social agents are left with the only possibility of buildingcollective identities through processes of articulation of meaning. Domi-nant hegemonic practices attempt to achieve some sort of closure of thesocial, that is, to produce a relatively unified and normalized set ofcategories to understand reality; in the process of doing so, however,antagonisms emerge, and these antagonisms, in turn, make possible theappearance of new actors and discourses. In post-industrial society, forinstance, the main antagonisms are the result of the hegemonic formationthat arose after World War II, characterized by pervasive processes ofcommodification, bureaucratization and cultural massification of life, andit is as a result of these antagonisms that contemporary social movements -such as the women’s, gay, ecology and peace movements - have emerged.A new political situation, Laclau and Mouffe (1985) argue, has arisen as

a result of a general phenomenon, namely, ’the decline of a form of politicsfor which the division of the social into two antagonistic camps [thebourgeoisie and the working class] is an original and immutable datum,prior to all hegemonic construction’ (1985: 151). In the new situation, thereis no privileged political subject (such as the proletariat, as in the previousmodel), but a plurality of collective actors each struggling within their ownsphere (workers, women, students, ecology activists, peasants, etc.).Politically, the main problem is to explore the process through which eachactor or social movement articulates a position or identity for itself; alsoimportant, of course, is the articulation of movements with each other,and, in the long run, perhaps the possibility of building a counter-hegemonic formation through the articulation of movements. This form ofarticulatory politics, which Laclau and Mouffe refer to as ’the hegemonicform of politics’, opens the way for a ’radical pluralist democracy’, one inwhich the gains of the democratic imaginary is extended to ever deeperdomains of social life through the autonomization of spheres.

Like Touraine, Laclau and Mouffe draw a significant distinctionbetween the ’advanced’ countries and the ’Third World’. The hegemonicform of politics, they state, only exists ’in societies in which the democraticrevolution has crossed a certain threshold’ (1985: 166). In the Third World,on the contrary, given the economic and social precariousness of thesituation, struggles are of a more ’conventional’ nature, namely, betweentwo clearly demarcated camps (the ruling class and the people). As we shallsee shortly, Latin American social movements clearly invalidate this claim.After all, has not the post-World War II hegemonic discourse of

development resulted in the Third World in a multiplicity of antagonisms



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and identities (e.g. ’peasants’, ’urban marginals’, ’those belonging to theinformal sector’, ’women bypassed by development’, the ’illiterate’, and’indigenous peoples who do not modernize’, that is, all those victims ofdevelopment who are the subjects of new forms of protest? It would seemmore appropriate to say that Latin America oscillates between two formsof politics: a logic of popular struggles in a relatively unified political space(against oligarchies, imperialism and developmentalist states); and a logicof ’democratic’ or autonomized struggles in a plural space. Both are theresult of articulations, given the precarious and unstable character of thesocial.’ 8

Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of politics as an articulatory process, asTouraine’s concept of the self-production of society through the control ofhistoricity, foreground the production of social life by social actors inchanging and conflictual fields of meanings and cultural practices. The roleof cultural innovation in everyday life as the stuff of social movements,however, is most developed by Alberto Melucci (1980, 1984, 1985, 1988a,1988b, 1989), whose work offers rich insights for anthropologists. ForMelucci (1985 : 797), social movements ’announce to society that a

fundamental problem exists in a given area. They have a growing symbolicfunction; one can probably speak of a prophetic function. They are a kindof new media.’ Contemporary collective action, moveover,

... assumes the form of networks submerged in everyday life. Within thesenetworks there is an experimentation with and direct practice of alternativeframeworks of meaning, in consequence of a personal commitment which issubmerged and almost invisible... The ’movements’ emerge only in limitedareas, for limited phases, and by means of moments of mobilization whichare the other, complementary phase of the submerged networks ... Whatnourishes [collective action] is the daily production of alternative frame-works of meaning, on which the networks themselves are founded and livefrom day to day ... This is because conflict takes place principally onsymbolic grounds, by challenging and upsetting the dominant codes uponwhich social relationships are founded in high density informational systems.The mere existence of a symbolic challenge is in itself a method of unmaskingthe dominant codes, a different way of perceiving and naming the world.(Melucci, 1988a: 248)

Movements, thus, emerge out of the very experience of daily life underconditions of domination, and cannot be understood independently of this’submerged’ cultural background. This also suggests that it would be moreappropriate to speak of movement networks or movements areas, in whichthe movement itself would be included along with the ’users’ of the culturalgoods and services produced by the movement. ’The normal situation oftoday’s movements’, Melucci stresses (1985: 800), ’is a network of small



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groups submerged in everyday life which require a personal involvement inexperiencing and practising cultural innovation.’ In the Third World, ofcourse, movements have to practice both cultural innovation and tech-niques of survival and of social and economic transformation.

This, however, does not diminish the importance of the cultural.

Interpreting Venezuelan social movements, for instance, Uribe andLander (1988) find that these movements elicit changes in the politicalsystem and the cultural-symbolic framework that result in new modes ofconstruction of political facts. Given the growing importance of massmedia, political facts are increasingly constituted through the symboliceffectiveness of the movements associated with the expansion of thecultural terrain. (This is clearly the case of the ecology movement, forinstance; see also Garcia [1992] for the Venezuelan ecology movement.)Social movements, in sum, bring about new social practices which operatein part through the constitution of spaces for the creation of meaning. Tothe extent that they are inevitably concerned with matters of economic andsocial transformation, they link together economic, social and politicalproblematics within an overarching cultural field.What this also means is that questions about daily life, democracy, the

state, and the redefinition of political practice and development are closelyinterrelated and that, moreover, social movements might be a particularlysuitable arena in which to explore these interrelations. Jelin has expressedthis notion in an insightful manner:

For a model of participatory democracy, the question [of the meaning ofpolitical practice in daily life] is one of how and where systems of social andcultural relations are articulated with mechanisms of power and what are themechanisms of intermediation. We believe that daily life and social move-/M~/t~ are pr/M~e~ .spacer ~ t~/HcA ? ~M~y ~.yc ~roc&MM o~ wc~M~o~,ments are privileged spaces in which to study these processes of mediation,since social movements are situated, at least in theory, in the intermediatespace between individualized, familiar, habitual, micro-climactic daily life,and socio-political processes writ large, of the State and the institutions,solemn and superior.... Our intention is to point to a field of construction ofdemocracy that, in the first place, is important in itself, that of the socialrelations of daily life (as Chilean feminists say: democracy in the home anddemocracy in the state). (1987: 11, emphasis added; my translation)

Many questions come to mind regarding the complex inquiry proposedby Jelin and others. For instance, if it is true that it is the practice of thoseengaged in the movements that have to be studied, how is this study to becarried out? How is social science to make visible the domain of popularpractices, and the intersubjective meanings that underlie them? How canwe account for the self-interpretation of agents? What is the field of



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meanings in which popular actions are inscribed, and how have these fieldsbeen generated by processes of domination and resistance, strategies andtactics, scientific knowledge and popular knowledge and traditions? Howdo social actors contribute to create new cultural models through theconstruction of collective identities as a means of self-affirmation? To

problematize everyday life, more generally, is to provide the conditions fora different social theory and interpretive framework. After all, everydaylife involves a collective act of creation, a collective signification, a culture.Reflection on everyday life thus has to be located at the intersection ofmicro-processes of articulation of meaning through practices, on the onehand, and macro-processes of domination, on the other.Recent trends in the study of popular culture contribute important clues

and methods to explore further the relations between daily life, culturalresistance, and collective political activity, although they can only bementioned here (see Angus and Jhally, 1988; Fiske, 1989a, 1989b; Willis,1990). The work of Michel de Certeau, already mentioned, has beenpivotal in this regard. Building upon de Certeau’s work, Fiske hasproposed an ’ethnosemiotic approach’ to the study of popular culture thatfocuses on the uses that people make of the products of the cultureindustries (such as TV, music videos, shopping centers, fashion and thelike). This approach moves from the dominant ’text’ (cultural form orproduct) to their concrete appropriation by the people (its ’users’),focusing on the role of people as ’agent[s] of culture in process’ and as’structured instances of culture in practice’ (Fiske 1990: 86). It assumes thatconfronted with dominant products people engage in ’semiotic resistance’and creativity, a fact which cannot be reduced to ’escapism’ but which, onthe contrary, has profound cultural and political significance. ’Ethnogra-phy’, Fiske summarizes,

... is concerned to trace the specifics of the uses of a system, the ways thatthe various formations of the people have evolved of making do with theresources it provides. Ethnosemiotics is concerned with interpreting theseuses and their politics and in tracing in them instances of the larger systemthrough which culture (meanings) and politics (action) intersect. (1990: 98)

Inquiry into social movements from this perspective seeks to restore thecentrality of popular practices to the analysis, to vindicate the value of thepractices of the majority in producing the world in which we live. A word ofcaution, however, must be placed in connection with the possible use ofthis approach in Third World contexts. If it is true that in post-industrialsocieties ’people make popular culture at the interface between everydaylife and the products of the culture industry’ (Fiske, 1989b: 6), in the Third



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World the dynamics of cultural production cannot be reduced to the ’uses’of dominant products or texts. In the Third World, given the State’sinability to provide for the needs of the population, the production andcirculation of meanings are not completely overdetermined by thecommerical forms of western capitalism. As the following examples show,there still exist practices, ’residual’ or ’emergent’ (Williams, 1980), thathave a decisive collective character, and which still have the potential toprovide a different basis for resistance and collective action. In otherwords, and despite the pervasive influence of modernity’s technologies,there still exist, in the Third World, socially significant groups (even ifnever ’pure’, of course) that represent alternative cultural possibilities.One final aspect that must be mentioned, even if it cannot be developed

here, is the changing nature of ’the political’, which, with the exception ofthe work of Laclau and Mouffe, is assumed but insufficiently theorized inmost social movements literature. While a number of authors recognizethe inadequacy of thinking about the new movements in terms of existing(western) political theory, few have broached the task of theorizing thepolitical in a broader fashion. At the root of this difficulty is the fact thatpolitical science and political sociology are ill prepared to provide a generaltheory of the political, to the extent that they take for granted a particularform of society, that of the modem West, and a domain - ’politics’ - thathas to be delineated as an identifiable and particular sector of social life byobjective, positive knowledge. For a number of theorists (for instance,Taylor, 1985; Lefort, 1986, 1988; Castoriadis, 1987,1988), political scienceand sociology do not provide grounds for a definition of ’the political’ thattranscends these cultural limits. This task, as these authors argue in theirrespective ways, has to be advanced in the domain of political philosophy,a terrain that must also be travelled by political anthropology in rethinkingits categories in ways that make them less dependent on westernhistoricity.For Lefort (1988: 219), a general understanding of the political in

relation to the principles that generate different forms of society must beguided by ’a different requirement of knowledge’, one that attempts tosituate itself behind the theoretical constructs of specific societies; this, ofcourse, assumes that the task always has to be recommenced, since it

inevitably depends on what is given to the investigator by his/her historicalposition. In other words, to the extent that the inquiry implies a certainform of institution of the social, the philosopher must account for themodes of differentiation and articulation that make the specific socialformation possible (a point that Laclau and Mouffe seem to overlook whenthey discuss ’articulation’ only in reference to the West). Any social



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formation implies both a system for giving meaning to social relations (aculture) and for staging them (a set of practices). In the modem West,these systems entail the experience of the world as object (external to theobserver), and a pre-given schema of actions, practices and relationsencoded in the domains ’political’, ’social’, ’religious’, and the like (Lefort,1988:216-21).Like Lefort, Castoriadis (1987) stresses the fact that it is impossible to

posit a total theory of the political, society or history, because ’everythought of society and of history belongs to society and to history.... Andthe fact that it knows itself as such does not take it out of its mode of beingas a dimension of social-historical doing.’ Instead, the theorist mustembark upon a task of elucidation which, ’even if it takes an abstract turn,is inseparable from a political aim and a political project’ (Castoriadis,1987: 3). General political theories are, for Lefort and Castoriadis, ’purefictions’. Charles Taylor’s (1985b) advocacy for an ’interpretive’ politicalscience is akin to Castoriadis’s notion of elucidation. For Taylor, empiricalsocial science is incapable of accounting for the background of understand-ing - intersubjective meanings which are constitutive of social reality butwhich cannot be captured by brute data or empirical categories - thatnecessarily underlie its object. Meaning, and the communal, are inevitablybypassed by these sciences.A final complication is added by Foucault (1982,1991), to the extent that

his definition of power as the structuring of the field of thinking and actionof others brings in another dimension to the political. This ’structuring’, inFoucault, is achieved through ’technologies of government’ effected andstabilized through discourse and, again, is specific to each historical period.’Culture’ itself, it can be argued, is the result of discourses and practices ofgovemmentality (concerning health, the body, planning, the population,etc.). One then has to practice a sort of interpretive analytics, or, inFoucault’s words (see Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982), an ’historical ontologyof ourselves’, that is, an investigation of how we have come to beconstituted as subjects by specific discourses and practices of modernity.Any theory of the political must take this variable into account. A

politically oriented anthropology of modernity can also be envisaged alongthe same lines.Our discussion of European social movements theories should not imply

that they should be taken at face value. Moreover, the qualification ofthese theories as ’European’ is problematic; after all, most of its leadingproponents (Laclau and Mouffe, Touraine, Castells) have spent significantperiods of time in Latin America. For these theorists, Latin America hasbeen a ’center’ of knowledge production. It might seem more appropriate



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to interpret intellectual production in this area along the lines of ’travellingtheories and theorists’ proposed by Said (1983:226-47) and Clifford(1989). For these authors, theory production in the post-colonial worldcannot be seen as simply produced in one place and applied in another, butas a complex process of productions in a discontinuous terrain.9 Thepresentation of these theories here is meant to convey, provisionally, theimportance of social movements inquiry for anthropology, on the one handand, on the other, to give an idea of the complex processes of constitutionof the subject in today’s societies within the space of collective action. If it istrue that the social subject has been decentered in important ways, it is byno means clear how various recenterings and reconstructions are takingplace. Social movements theory provides clues to rethink the constitutionof the subject.

1/1. Recent anthropological studies of social movementsFew studies have been conducted to date that take as a point of departurethe trends in social movements theory and research outlined in theprevious section. What follows is an account of one such study in somedetail, plus a brief mention of a few others. What is crucial to these studies,and to the argument of this paper, is that social movements be seen ascultural struggles in a fundamental sense, that is, as struggles overmeanings as much as over socio-economic conditions. This is doublyimportant because social movements in the Third World, for understand-able reasons, tend to be seen primarily as struggles over economic means ofsurvival. As central to the socio-economic aspects is the defense, creationand reconstruction of meanings at all levels, from everyday life to nationaldevelopment.One of the best examples of anthropological studies of social movements

inspired by the recent literature discussed here is the study by Orin Starn ofa peasant movement in Peru, one of the largest and most sustained peasantmovements in 20th-century Latin America. The movement grew out ofvigilante patrols (rondas campesinas) started in rural towns throughoutnorthern Peru in the late 1970s. Increasing robbery, disenchantment withthe official justice system, the economic crunch of the period and otherfactors such as previous experience with agrarian reform, a renewed role ofthe church and the presence of activists formed the background for theemergence of this movement. But vigilantism soon evolved into a wholesystem of dispute resolution, involving issues ranging from land ownershipto family fights, wife beating and robbery itself. It also resulted in the

development of a new spirit of local cooperation and autonomy, most



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manifest perhaps in the implementation of small public works projects suchas the construction of community halls, health centers, irrigation channels,road construction and the like. In short, in some sense at least, it resulted inalternative ’development’ proposals (Stam, 1989, 1991a, 1991b, 1992).The rondas campesinas now operate in over 4000 communities of Peru’s

northern Andes. What is most interesting about them, however, is theirinnovative political practice. Stam’s analysis starts with the recognition ofthe long engagement of peasants with patterns of power and meaning.Peruvian peasants, he insists, do not constitute a separate, timeless’Andean world’, as many anthropologists and rural economists andsociologists have assumed (Stam, 1991b). They are, so to say, ’impureproducts’ (Clifford, 1988), actively placed in regional, national andtransnational flows of food, commodities, ideas and people, a fact that isreflected in their political practices. The very idea of anti-thievery patrols,for instance, originated in the old hacienda rondas of the 1920s, whichlandowners used to repress and discipline the peasantry. Today’s rondasalso borrow from military procedures, well known to the region’s peasantsthrough compulsory military service and their participation in wars.’Patrols’, they call the ronda activity, as in the military. But peasants do notmerely reproduce the practices of these repressive institutions, buttransform them into an original and more democratic system, relying noton authoritarian ways but on coordinated committees, and always usingelements from peasant culture such as dress, songs and dances.

Similarly with their practices of organizing and the delivery of justice.Even if ronderos borrow notions of hierarchy and bureaucracy from theState and the justice system, they transform them in unique ways.Gathering in wide circles in community settings, rondas impart justice witha more egalitarian and communal feeling. In all these new practices, or’new ways of doing politics’ - as new social movements theorists wouldhave it - peasants do not mimic dominant models; they appropriate themand remodel them into their own distinctive system. Of course, this newpeasant system still exhibits some of the old features, such as theirentanglement with traditional political parties, some partisan division andpopulism, control by men or organizations, partial continuity withconventional political strategies, some use of violence, and a feeling ofboth respect and resentment towards the State and the law. But it is alsotrue that the rondas have brought about very visible benefits to theircommunities, that their use of violence in punishing thieves is containedand much less severe and widespread than that of the army or the ShiningPath, that women have found in the rondas a forum to denounce wifebeating and punish the culprits, that the rondas have contained the



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advancement of the Shining Path, reduced peasants’ dependence on theState and its bureaucratic and unfair justice system, brought about anunprecedented sense of security, and, finally and more generally, that theyhave renewed a powerful sense of independent identity among thepeasants.

This type of rural organizing thus represents a relatively new form ofpolitical culture and identity. As the theorists of popular culture discussedin the previous section, Starn (1992:3) stresses ’the need for closehermeneutic readings that convey the unique cadence of every ruralmovement... a firm grasp on problems of meaning and identity can assistgreatly in making sense of why rural protest occurs and how it unfolds’. ForStarn, it is not sufficient to study the everyday forms of peasant resistance;it is also to open peasant movements, he contends, that we must direct ourattention if we want to develop a more realistic understanding of howpeasants, through active construction and creation, fashion visions,symbols and procedures for organizing. In other words, what is at stake isan examination of how peasants construct their identities and communitiesthrough innovation and recombination of elements, through local syn-thesis and innovation, resistance and accommodation. It is this culturaldynamics of identity formation, this analysis of cultural politics that paysclose attention to the role of meanings in a struggle that cannot bebypassed, Starn argues, if we seek a more nuanced and satisfactory readingof collective social action in the contemporary world of today.

Starn’s work thus demonstrates, as he explicitly states it, how contem-porary social movements theory can provide valuable insights for re-examining topics that have for long been of interest to anthropologists,such as rural protest. The converse is also true, to the extent that much ofthe ’new social movements’ literature has not paid attention to peasantmovements, as these tend to be seen as a ’traditional’ political arena. ThePeruvian example clearly shows that peasants do partake of the ’new formsof doing politics’ so much hailed by today’s theorists. But it also shows, as acorrective to conventional peasant studies within anthropology and otherdisciplines, that peasant collective actions are not only the determinedproduct of large structures of domination, nor can peasants be defined by aset of ’essential’ features or by appealing to certain ’objective’ criteria thatwould bring to light a preconstituted category; the ’Peruvian peasant’, onthe contrary, is a heterogeneous and varied collectivity, and the movementitself the result of a self-creating process of identity formation through thearticulation of manifold elements originating in plural cultural, geographi-cal and socio-economic spaces. In sum, no less than their postmoderncounterparts in post-industrial society, peasants also construct their



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’subjectivities’ through the articulation of ’subject positions’, as post-structuralist theory would have it. By the same token, the movement ismultivalent, and cannot be seen simply as ’purely oppositional’ or ’powerserving’, but as practicing an innovative politics of challenging, shifting,and sometimes accepting established forms of power.Other anthropological studies of social movements have demonstrated

the value of analysing collective action from the perspective of both criticalanthropology and social movements theory .10 The ‘constructivist’ ap-proach to the study of collective identities, focused on a close reading of thediscourses and practices that account for them, has been important instudies of movements as varied as those of indigenous peoples, squattersand gays. Questions of historicity, cultural innovation and symbolicmediation are generally important. Although there is some coherence ofapproach, resulting from the researchers’ reliance on recent trends in boththe anthropology and social movements theory, the field can be said to bejust beginning, and many questions remain to be answered. For instance,how are these studies modifying certain features of standard anthropologi-cal practice? How do anthropologists negotiate their participation in amovement? What does it mean to become involved with an openly politicalmovement? What constitutes your ’community’, and how is fieldwork to beapproached? If the movement is divided, or if it takes place in a vast anddecentralized space, how would this modify the methods of study? Thepossibilities for exploring these questions - and others such as the textualrepresentation of social movements, the connection between theory andpractice, the dissemination of knowledge obtained by the researcher and,more generally, the ethics and politics of knowledge at stake in these typesof situations - offer rich possibilities for the future.

lV, Social movements and the Ire-imagining’ ofanthropologyAt the same time that other social scientists were trying to reformulatetheir understanding of collective action and political practice, in anthro-pology the character of the ethnographic enterprise, of representation, andof the politics of the discipline as a whole became topics of heated debate(Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Marcus and Fischer, 1986; Clifford, 1988).What is now at stake, Clifford says, ’is an ongoing critique of the West’smost confident, characteristic discourses’ (1986: 10), which, in anthro-pology, has led to the realization that ’no one can write about others anylonger as if they were discrete objects or texts’ (1986: 25). A new task thusinsinuates itself: that of coming up with ’more subtle, concrete ways of



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writing and reading ... new conceptions of culture as interactive andhistorical (1986: 25). Innovation in anthropological writing taking placewithin this context is recognized as ’moving [ethnography] toward anunprecedently acute political and historical sensibility that is transformingthe way cultural diversity is portrayed’ (Marcus and Fischer, 1986 : 16). Itis thus not a question of dismantling anthropology, but of re-imaging it inthe light of new epistemological and political challenges.True to good academic fashion, these prominent critics have already

become the object of various critiques, some of them more pointed orconvincing than others. The whole notion of culture, some say, has notbeen sufficiently problematized; on the contrary, the new trends propi-tiate a relativization of culture which is not sufficiently aware of the waysin which hierarchical differences among cultures are created and main-tained (Friedman, 1987). The critics are also found to overlook in theirtheorizing matters of crucial political import such as American imperial-ism and a host of articulate and increasingly audible Third World voicesthat denounce it (Said, 1989). The concern with the literary and ethno-graphic practice, it has also been argued, has not been accompanied by ade-categorizing and re-situating of the literary ’as the place where socialcode is challenged’, a step that would be required for a more radicalapproach to writing culture (Trinh, 1989b: 7). Some also find that the’textual focus ... may curtail our understanding of more fundamental[socio-historical] processes’, that is, the need to convey ’the complexitiesof life that both differ from and articulate with our own’ (Gewertz andErrington, n.d.: 4, 28).Other sets of critiques have focused on the ’dialogic’ emphasis of the

new ethnography. It is argued that this emphasis - linked to the attemptto arrange textual space so that informants or others can have their ownvoices - may actually hide the real processes that obtain in any fieldworksituation, that is, the emotional, power-laden dialogic engagement inwhich gender, ethnicity and class identifications become strategic tools(Page, 1988). Moreover, the metaphor of representation as dialogicalcomes close ’to a contemplative stance by ignoring praxis and the plu-rality of subjects that negotiate the historical and political process’ (Ulin,1991: 64). More generally, as the same author argues, postmodernistanthropology, although important in providing correctives to positivistepistemologies, pays insufficient attention to the concrete social con-ditions in contemporary capitalist society that shape the representationprocess to begin with, and which a reformed political economy mustaccount for. In a similar vein, postmodern anthropology is found wantingwhen it comes to the question of for whom we write, and how; this



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disregard for the audience is seen as a serious drawback in anthropology’sattempt to write socially and politically committed works (Sutton, 1991).

Perhaps the most visible critique of the critics has come from a group offeminist anthropologists who see in the postmodern-inspired ’new eth-nography’ a dangerous model (Mascia-Lees et al., 1989). Many of theinsights of the new ethnography, these authors argue, have actually beenactive concerns within feminism for several decades. This makes evenmore paradoxical the dismissal of feminism by the proponents of the newethnography. More pointedly, they argue that postmodern theorizing maywork to preserve the privileged position of western white males, to theextent that their questioning of textually constituted authority may actuallypreserve their socially constituted authority as powerful academics whocontrol anthropology’s agenda. In other words, postmodern inspiredanthropology critics are blind to their own politics. Feminism, on thecontrary, is clearly grounded in a politics that emphasizes the collectiveconstruction of a feminist project, ’in a practice based on the materialconditions of women’s lives’ (p. 23). More generally, postmodernism, withits emphasis on the breakdown of metanarratives, ’is a new synthesizingallegory that is being projected onto white women and Third Worldpeoples who only recently have been partially empowered’ (p. 32). In sum,the authors conclude, anthropologists should turn to feminism rather thanto the new ethnography for inspiration for their work.Of course, the choice does not have to be ’either/or’, but that, as other

critics of the critics suggest, anthropologists should lean on both feminismand postmodernism (and on political economy, one might add) withcertain qualifications, as Deborah Gordon (1988, 1991) has convincinglyargued.11 In other words, there is much in the new ethnography that can beof value to feminism and feminist-inspired anthropology and, conversely,there is a lot that the theorists of the new ethnography can learn fromfeminism. A recognition of the importance of women’s struggles - and, asbell hooks adds, particularly those of women of color (1990) - of the lastdecades does not mandate that we should overlook the importantconceptual and methodological contributions of the new ethnography and,more generally, of poststructuralism and postmodernism. The dangers forfeminism in adopting uncritically modem epistemologies and universalshas also been brought to light, particularly in relation to ethnocentrism andclassism within the women’s movement (Spelman, 1988; Trinh, 1989a;hooks, 1990). Ong (1988) and Visweswaran (1988) have warned about thecomplexities of building a feminist anthropology that is fully aware of theadvantages white feminists have in relation to Third World women. This,of course, applies to anthropology as a whole. It can be added that the



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epistemological and political decentering of the (white bourgeois male)subject is essential for the claiming of alterity, which means that not allpostmodernisms are without politics, as Latin American discussions onpostmodernity, as well as the profusion of feminist writings consciouslyinspired by postmodernism, tend to demonstrate. 12One aspect that has not come to light in discussions about the new

critiques in anthropology and its shortcomings is the extent to which bothcritique and its discussions are shaped by its taking place within the (US)academy. Actually, both critics and the critics’ critics share this space ofenunciation. They are certainly situated in terms of class, gender and race,but also in terms of shared disciplinary practices that have importantnormalizing effects for those who engage in them. The whole debate (thispaper clearly included) is not immune to the pressures of the academy,such as the need to demarcate terrains, set agendas, compete forpublications and positions, and the like. Within the new ethnographyliterature, Gordon (1991) and Rabinow (1985, 1986) have referred brieflyto this aspect of what Strathem (1989) has broadly called ’an ethnographyof western knowledge practices’. More recently, and with great insight andpassion, Trinh (1989a) and hooks (1990) have taken up the issue, framing itwithin certain salient debates in cultural studies. Both authors point to thedifficulties in keeping a radical political commitment within the university,given the professional demands faced by academics; both authors alsoadvocate different practices of knowing and writing which might allowacademics to maintain and express such a commitment.For hooks, the problems and dangers of working within the academy are

manifold:

If there is no mutual exchange between the cultural subjects (African-Americans, for example) that are written about and the critics who writeabout them, a politics of domination is easily reproduced wherein intellectualelites assume an old colonizing role, that of the privileged interpreter-cultural overseer ... I am constantly aware of the way our very location in anacademic setting, where one’s work is periodically reviewed, judged,evaluated, etc., informs what we write about and how we write. On the onehand, ’cultural studies’ has made writing about non-white culture moreacceptable, particularly in the humanities; yet, on the other hand, this workdoes not emerge within a context that necessarily stresses the need toapproach these subjects with a progressive politics or a liberatory pedagogy.Therein lies the danger. Cultural Studies could easily become the space for theinformers... When this happens, cultural studies reinscribes patterns ofcolonial domination, where the ’Other’ is always made the object, appropri-ated, interpreted, taken over by those in power, by those who dominate.(1990: 9,125; emphasis added)



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Cultural studies, in other words - particularly those that remain at the levelof the literary - is in danger of becoming the equivalent of the ’armchairanthropology’ of the 19th century .13 This has profound political conse-quences. For academic practices are part of those ’western ways of creatingthe world’ that Strathem talks about; part of modernity and of anthro-pology’s ’endorsement of certain interests in the description of social life’.They are, indeed, those parts most invisible to us, because they give us theright to speak and the right to know ourselves and others. These practicescannot be dispelled arbitrarily, but they have to be historicized, as part ofdominant modern modes of knowing and possessing the world, andtransformed accordingly, from the inside. Essential to anthropology is itsreliance on modern (western) modes of knowledge; at the same time,anthropology has failed to construct a politics that problematizes thisdependence and the relationship between the knowledge that makes itpossible and the social positioning from which it operates and which ittends to reinforce.Feminism provides a partial model for the politicization of the academy,

even if the difficulties in cross-cultural contexts are rea1.14 The possibilityfor doing theory ’in other modes of consciousness’ advocated by writerssuch as Gloria Anzaldda, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Patricia Williams (1991) andbell hooks also has to be taken seriously. But above all, anthropology mustmove away from the organization of knowledge in which it exists -

abstract, disembodied and disembedded from popular social contexts,accountable primarily to the academy - and start to participate moreexplicitly in local questions and activities. It is here that the potentiallycatalyzing role of social movements theory can be most fruitfully investi-gated. A more dynamic understanding of culture, a new theorization of thepolitical and of otherness and difference - coupled with a transformedsense for the connections between collective political practice and themacro structures of domination - might provide an arena in which thepolitics of anthropology itself - as a practice entrenched in and dependenton a western will to knowledge - might be posed with renewed poign-ancy.15

In sum, the investigation of something so varied, heterogeneous andcomplex as contemporary social movements is a challenge that can deepenanthropology’s self-critique, having important implications for fieldwork,ethnographic writing and political expression. For whom we write, andhow.16 This remains at the crux of anthropology’s predicaments. Socialmovements research is one way (among many) in which both political andepistemological aspects of the crisis of representation can be fruitfullyinvestigated. It is an arena in which anthropologists can pursue a novel



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hybridization between theory and practice, between knowledge andaction, by innovating with forms of knowing and writing applied to ourunderstanding of the new social practices of collective social actors.

Conclusion

Contemporary social movements are about the negotiation of the practicesand rationalities of modernity and postmodernity in the envisioning andreconstruction of social orders. Recent literature on social movements is areminder of how people continue to shape their world through types ofpolitical activism that include the fashioning of visions, symbols, andalternative meanings as much as concrete forms of mobilization andorganizing. Although anthropologists in the past have shown sensitivity tothe cultural aspects of politics and resistance, recent theorizing on thenature of social movements unveil a profound transformation in thestructure of collective action and political practice, one that requires newconcepts and modes of understanding. The new concepts being providedby theorists offer a particularly rich opportunity for anthropologicalresearch.To understand contemporary social movements, one must look at the

micro-level of everyday practices and their imbrication with largerprocesses of development, patriarchy, capital and the State. How theseforces find their way into people’s lives, their effects on people’s identityand social relations, and people’s responses and ’uses’ of them have to beexamined through a close engagement and reading of popular actions.Social movements theorists today speak of a proliferation of political andcultural identities, the fact that these identities are constructed throughprocesses of articulation that start out of submerged networks of meanings,proceed through cultural innovation in the domain of everyday life, andmay result in visible and sizable forms of collective action for the control of

historicity. These processes can be gleaned clearly from studies of socialmovements in Latin America and the Third World. In some sense at least,it can be said that the current crisis of capital has placed Latin America andthe Third World at the forefront of the transformation of modernity. Evenin a provisional and perhaps precarious fashion, the new conditions forcollective action in Latin America are already propitiating novel organiz-ational forms which might lead us more clearly in the direction of adifferent politics.

In the post-Writing Culture17 era of anthropology, we must assume thatwriting about social movements will have to adopt modes that avoid orproblematize the monologic, realist representations of past studies of



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politics and resistance. If one were to bring the concerns with represen-tation and ethnographic writing to the social movements arena, one wouldhave to deal with questions such as: how do we write about them? Who’speaks for’ the movements? How can we account for the fact that socialmovements rarely speak with a single voice? The fact that the socialmovements of today are of a different nature than those of the past (at leastas analysts perceived them yesterday and today) entails that today’s studiesmust also be different from those of the past. That the task of representingcultures is now admitted to be ’strategic and selective’ (Clifford,1988: 231)takes on unprecedented dimensions in social movements studies to theextent that the cultural and political significance of the many voices thatconverge in a fieldwork situation, the discursive positioning of researchers,activists and collective actors, and the complex epistemological and politi-cal negotiations inevitably at stake will not be amenable to facile simpli-fications. A radicalization of discursive models of ethnographic field-workand writing (’dialogical’, ’polyphonic’ and the like) may be possible.

In the long run, what is at stake, as far as Third World social movementsis concerned, is the generation of new ways of seeing, of renewing culturalself-descriptions by displacing the categories with which Third Worldgroups have been constructed by dominant forces. It is a matter of

contributing to regenerating people’s spaces or creating new ones byworking with those who have actually survived the age of modernity anddevelopment by resisting it or by insinuating themselves creatively in thecircuits of capital and modernization. As Ashis Nandy (1989: 265) puts it,’the recovery of the other selves of cultures and communities, selves notdefined by the dominant global consciousness, may turn out to be the firsttask of social criticism and political activism and the first responsibility ofintellectual stock-taking in the first decades of the coming century’. Socialmovements, as symbols of resistance to the dominant politics of knowledgeand organization of the world, provide some paths in the direction of thiscalling, that is, for the re-imagining of the Third World. And perhapsanthropology’s own re-imagining has an important contribution to make inthis regard.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My friend and colleague Jacqueline Urla provided invaluable insights and questionsat various points during the writing of this paper. The result has been a clearer andricher article. I would also like to thank Sonia Alvarez, from the Politics Board at theUniversity of Calffomia at Santa Cruz, friend and ’fellow traveller’ in the area of socialmovements theory and research during the past several years; Orin Stam for sharing



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with me his valuable work; and comments by Critique of Anthropology’s editorialgroup.

NOTES

1. One thinks particularly of Marx, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Foucault as’philosophers of practice’. The relationship between Wittgenstein, Marx andFoucault, especially from the point of view of their notions of human practice, isanalyzed by Shaviro (1986). An insightful study of social theory as practice isfound in Taylor (1985).

2. Anthropology’s failure to address issues of collective political practice is notunrelated to the fact that inquiry into practice, especially in Europe and NorthAmerica, has remained at the level of the individual or at some broad, unspecified’cultural’ level, a point that Ortner already noted in her piece. It is also related toan insufficient theoretical construction of ’the political’ in anthropology.

3. See, for instance, Wallace (1956, 1970); Worsley (1957) (also for a list of

pertinent bibliography); Linton (1943). ’So plentiful is the literature on thesemovements that no one person can hope to survey it all,’ stated Worsley (1957)in his study of Melanesian cargo cults, referring to millenarian movements ingeneral.

4. ’Wolf’s commodity book’, it has been said, ’proceeds in a straight line throughHistory seen as progressive stages in the unfolding of a Totality [the logic ofcapital].’ Moreover, Wolf’s formulations ’reify history as something to bepossessed,’ resulting in a ’meta-irony by the surprising absence in his book ofthe people’s-without-history Histories’ (Taussig, 1986:5, 6). Contemporarytheory offers powerful correctives to this type of theorizing.

5. On the nature of modernity and postmodemity in Latin America, see especiallyCalderón (1988), Lechner (1988), Quijano (1988), García Canclini (1989). Ananalysis of this trend is found in Escobar (1992).

6. It would be impossible to review here the pertinent literature and debate onsocial movements and ’new social movements’. See Escobar and Alvarez (eds,1992) for a thorough review of Latin American, Western European and NorthAmerican literature in this area, including their relative emphases, points ofcontact and contention. There is a marked difference between the ’identity-centered’ paradigms dominant in Europe and Latin America and the ’resourcemobilization’ approaches more common in North America. See Cohen (1985)for this classification of ’paradigms’. Cross-pollination of research between thetwo approaches is beginning to take place (Tarrow, 1988; Kriesi, Tarrow andKlandermans, eds, 1988; Alvarez, 1989). For North American social move-ments, see Epstein (1990), Flores and Yuidice (1990), Fantasia (1988).

7. It would be impossible to even summarize or list the relevant literature here. Themost complete study of recent social movements to this date is the ten countrystudy carried out by the Latin American Social Science Council, CLACSO(Calderón, ed., 1986). For a comprehensive review, see Alvarez and Escobar



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(eds, 1992). Another anthology in Spanish has been published recently byCamacho and Menjívar (eds, 1989). The only anthology in English on LatinAmerican social movements from this perspective is Slater (ed., 1985).

8. Several important critiques of Laclau and Mouffe have been published already,and this is not the point to summarize them. Particularly criticized are theirdisplacement of the class concept, and their unwillingness to theorize the unityof social labor, that is, the fact that despite the ’fragmentation’ of social actorsthere is an underlying dynamics common to them all originated in the fact that allof them respond to capitalism in one form or another (on this last point, seeO’Connor, 1988; also Rosenthal, 1988). It must be emphasized that Laclau andMouffe are not ’doing away’ with class, but with its a priori privileged status.Class can become a central issue, but it will always have to be througharticulation. Class is not excepted from this logic. Now, if it is true that,particularly in the Third World, social actors are responding to capitalism of onesort or another, this response cannot be reduced to the logic of capital or itscontradictions. Moreover, how various groups experience, understand andrespond to the conditions created by capital makes a significant difference. Thisdifference is particularly relevant at the level of culture. In sum, a politicaleconomy that takes into account the discursive nature of social reality asconceived by certain poststructuralist theories (and vice versa) still wait to beworked out. This reworked political economy must be fed back into socialmovements theory, from which it tends to be absent (for instance, in Melucci’scase), as a way to strengthen those theories and the politics they inform.

9. For a fuller discussion of this point, see Escobar (1992).10. Anthropological researches that address some of the issues raised in contem-

porary social movements theory include studies of the Basque nationalistmovement (Urla, 1987,1988, forthcoming); squatter movements in Mexico City(Díaz-Barriga, 1991); indigenous people’s movements in Colombia (Findji, 1992,an historian with long experience of ethnographic research); the gay movementin Brazil (MacRae, 1991, 1992); a peasant movement in Korea (Abelmann,1990); and religious movements in Brazil (Burdick, 1990, 1992); SandraMorgen’s work on women’s health clinics in the United States (Bookman andMorgen, eds, 1988) is being reinterpreted in the light of social movements theory(Sandra Morgen, personal communication). A critical view of the implications ofusing European theories in Latin America is advanced by Stephen (1990), withspecial attention to anthropology and the role of women in contemporary socialmovements.

11. See the special issue of the Santa Cruz journal Inscriptions (Nos. 3/4) edited byDeborah Gordon (1988). This issue can be seen as an insider’s critique of the’new ethnography’. The most complete feminist critique of the ’new ethnogra-phy’ is found in Deborah Gordon’s recently completed doctoral dissertation,’Engendering Ethnography’, Board of Studies in History of Consciousness,University of California, Santa Cruz, August 1991.

12. The possible engagements between postmodemism and feminism are ex-plored, in different ways, in the works of Diamond and Quinby (eds, 1988), Trinh



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(1989a), Haraway (1989), Fraser (1989), hooks (1990), and Nicholson (ed.,1990), among others. In these works, postmodemism contributes to rethinkingcategories such as race, gender, class, nature, science and culture. Nicholson,for instance, believes that postmodemism, if ’carefully constructed’, can be apowerful ally for feminism.

13. I owe this point to Tracey Tsugawa.14. Generally speaking, ’the feminist movement (like other grassroots social

movements) provides anthropologists with an actual audience, in the publicsphere, with which ideas can be engaged, discussed and disputed’ (Sutton,1991:101). The issues are somewhat different when cross-cultural andcross-national situations are involved. But even in these cases, there is muchthat anthropologists can do. Taussig’s first book in Spanish, published inColombia under a pseudonym, for instance, had wide distribution among theBlack populations it dealt with, and was useful in the beginning stages of theirsocial movement. More recently, Stam (1991 a) has published a short book inPeru reflecting on the current conjuncture of the rondas campasinas, intendedfor Peruvian audiences.

15. My discussion of anthropology from the perspective of the politics of knowledgehas been sharpened by discussions with Shiv Visvanathan (from the Center forthe Study of Developing Societies in Delhi) and my colleague Frédérique Marglin.

16. I am not advocating a simplistic principle that we have to write ’for the people’and in ways that the ’people’ can understand (in any case, this sort of populistscholarship is rarely free of condescension). Nor that ’social movements’ are a’pure’ space of alternatives, free of modem elements. This is far from being thecase. What I mean is that we must situate ourselves in different spaces at thesame time (the popular domains, the academy, the space of western know-ledge, that of global cultural, social and economic factors, and the interrelationsamong them all), and let this complex scenario (and not only the needs of theacademy) orient our work.

17. The term is Jackie Urla’s (see acknowledgements).

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